AR9721 chipset is the only one on the market with completely open source linux drivers and firmware, this make it WiFi chipset of choice for people who respect their freedom.

We have MOD-WIFI-AR9721-ANT for quite some time and it’s very popular item, but the 200mm antenna make it not quite small. Now we add to our web shop the version without external antenna. It’s with 85 x 25 x 10 mm dimension and have same working distance as the external antenna version.

If you have problem with some device or driver or don’t know how to tweak your Linux distribution, or just want to chat with other people who use Linux – come to us on December 10th, 11.00-14.30 o’clock and meet Linux experts who will participate this event and get free advice and help.

Where to find us? Here is Google Maps Olimex Ltd location. And here is picture of the map, the green dot is the Olimex Training building where the GNU/Linux install fest will take place:

Good news is that Gigabit interface works well with Micrel/Microchip PHY and result is real Gigabit bandwidth. A20 although having Gigabit interface can’t make more than 700 Mbit I guess this is related to A20 capability to handle the data from GMAC. With A64 the speed is 932Mbit i.e. very close to 1Gb:

For eMMC we followed the advice to make it dual voltage 3.3V and 1.8V with aim to have faster transfers and we implemented it in the hardware, but the tests show that transfer is same even at 1.8V is a bit lower. I don’t know if this is due to lame software settings we do in the eMMC drivers, or just the eMMC we use have same transfer on both voltages (we check datasheet and the eMMC we use have same speed quoted on both voltages), so this may be useless for our eMMC chip:

19 years old intern in Free Electrons took the Cedrus reverse engineering of Allwinners proprietary CedarX video driver who is around since mid 2014 and made patches for mainline Linux kernel.

I’m sure we use these since they were made first available and they are build in our images, so I’m really puzzled why they have made their way to mainline just now and not earlier?

Isn’t it time Linux-Sunxi community to stop working on kernel fork and start to send all development and patches upstream like Rockchip developers do already for 2 years?

Looking at mainline kernel Rockchip has way better support now than Allwinner although Linux-Sunxi community to seem many times bigger than Rockchip community.

Rockchip devices are in many Chromebooks and Google push them to send all their work upstream to latest kernels.

None of newer Allwinner chips found it’s place in Chromebooks and this is the problem, for Android kernel 3.10 is enough and they will not move from it, neither they learn (or are capable to generate quality code) to upstream all work they do.

This is pitty as since A10/A20 we can’t see anything which to beat Rockchip as productivity.

RK3288 is mainline and although Cortex-A17 still faster than any chip Allwinner have.

Now Rockchip work to release their new super duper RK3399 (2x Cortex-A72 and 4x Cortex-A53) and again they upstream code before even selling the chip.

With two USB3 hosts this chip is good candidate for next OLinuXino 🙂

EDIT1: after the posting there were interesting comments from Chen-Yu Tsai (a.k.a. wens213) who point me that what Free Electrons did is not simple commit to already existing project but did from scratch v4l2 mem-2-mem codec driver! So I appologise for the underestimated efforts!

EDIT2: I admit that what I wrote about Linux-Sunxi repository was about Kernel 3.4 which I was using two years ago and which was developed “wild west” style. I was assuming as the repositories are still there this continues, but I was wrong!

Our boards are with A10/A13/A20 and have mainline support, so I didn’t followed closely what happens with Linux-Sunxi lately.

Chen-Yu and Siarhei explained that this repo is kept there for historical reasons and now all development is focused to upstream too! Good to know 🙂

At Linux-Sunxi there is very clear table about what is done ( light green) and on what is working (ornge)